Today, while I write this, I'm preparing myself for Winter Fantasy (Jan 23-26, Fort Wayne Indiana). I'll be flying out there, playing and DMing for three full days, and hoping not to catch the damn flu that has been stalking me all season.
The way we play at home is changing -- at least for those of us that are taking advantage of a lot of the benefits of newer technology and the latest ideas in gaming gadgets.
The same might be said for convention gaming, although the need for portability often sends even the most dedicated gadget nerd back to his old school pen and paper tools.
The Almighty iPad
There's no way around it -- the iPad is the single most revolutionary tool for a traveling gamer. Almost everything that you need for gaming can be handled on an iPad.
Reference Material -- whether it's PDFs of sourcebooks, access to online databases like the 4e Compendium, and iPad is a much more sensible, reasonable way to carry around the references you might need for a game. It's still possible to do without, of course -- and I should admit that I'm packing my Rules Compendium with me for my 4e games at Winter Fantasy -- but any other references documents I need I'm planning to access through my iPad.
Character Sheets -- There are many solutions available, and at this point I'd say you would have to be playing a small, edge case game to not be able to find some sort of character sheet app available for the iPad. For 4e, I'ma big fan of "i4e", by Cordax software, which takes character builder imports so I don't have to do any manual data entry -- although it's still possible to do manual data entry if I need to.
Dice -- This is one I don't like to use -- and I'm sure most of you would agree that it's a whole lot more fun to roll dice than it is to shake your iPad to pretend to roll digital dice. But, in a pinch, there are a ton of different dice apps out there. It might not be a terrible idea for some more complicated rolls, especially for those of us that don't do the math very quickly, to use an app for those rolls in the interest of keeping the game moving quickly.
Maps & Minis -- This is perhaps the most theoretical possibility for convention gaming, but it might be a real possibility in a few years. What's fun is that right now we actually have the technology.
With apps like the new version of Razeware's Battle Map, a iPad can host a game that is then shared through a cloud server to other iPads and iPhones. BM2 has both maps and figure tokens, so everything needed to represent the tactical map could be played out in the App, and accessed by players on their own devices.
This year, that's not something I'll expect to see. The app is fairly expensive, and there's no guarantee that enough players at the table will have iPads or iPhones to make it work. Also, a iPad is pretty small for a map display at a typical 8-10 seat round convention game table. At least there would be plenty of room for everyone's snacks.
But some of the biggest news coming out of CES this year was big touchscreens and larger scale tablets. In the next few years, this sort of digitally enabled play will become much more reasonable.
Fart Jokes -- Actually, what I mean by Fart Jokes is something much grander -- the fun we all have at the table, in and out of character. This is a big part of why we play, and it's the one thing that I can't imagine a technological replacement for in the near future.
The Down Sides
Multitasking With Devices - The biggest problem, with using an iPad for many of these roles -- character sheets, reference docs, dice, and even tactical tools like initiative, maps and tokens -- is that if you're trying to do all of this on one device, it can really show things down. If you have to switch back and forth between apps to look at your character sheet, and then look up the spell you'd like to cast, for example, it's going to be a little more frustrating than if you could have the book open to the spell while holding a paper character sheet.
Clearly, the dedicated gadget gamer is going to need a couple of devices to play convention games in a nearly-all-digital way.
Battery Life -- At conventions, we are used to playing for AT LEAST 12 hours in a day -- but it can be difficult to squeeze that kind of time out of an iPad if you're using it all day. You can dramatically improve the lifespan of a battery charge by being really judicious about what you have turned on, though. For one thing, you're probably best served keeping it in Airplane mode. Consider shutting down other services you might not really need -- Location services, for one thing, cane a big power drain.
Wifi -- Wireless service is not a guarantee on the convention floor. In a lot of cases, it's not necessary to have your device be useful, but it does mean that you need to think ahead. Even if a convention center does have Wifi, odds are it will be molasses-slow. If you have access to alternative ways to access the web -- through a personal access point or using a phone as a personal hotspot, etc -- you can make sure you have emergency web.But that tends to drain power quickly on both devices, so it should be kept off and used only when you need it.
Android and Windows Tablets
The app selections for Android and windows tablets isn't quite as well developed as it is for iOS devices, but it's coming along, and most of the important functions I've mentioned can be delivered on either alternative platform. Certainly PDF readers and eReaders are available on either, and dice apps are some of the earliest to come along. What's missing is the map sharing functionality that is still pretty bleeding edge, and hard to imagine using in a convention setting anytime soon.
Bottom Line:
Gadgets are getting cheaper, smaller, and more ubiquitous. It's not at all unusual to see an iPad at a convention table these days, and it's only a matter of time until it's safe to bet that more than half the players at the table will have a tablet of some sort -- and those that don't will probably at least have a smartphone. It's an exciting time, looking ahead to ways these devices will continue to improve our game experience, even when we're traveling to play.
What can you see yourself bringing to a convention?
The way we play at home is changing -- at least for those of us that are taking advantage of a lot of the benefits of newer technology and the latest ideas in gaming gadgets.
The same might be said for convention gaming, although the need for portability often sends even the most dedicated gadget nerd back to his old school pen and paper tools.
The Almighty iPad
There's no way around it -- the iPad is the single most revolutionary tool for a traveling gamer. Almost everything that you need for gaming can be handled on an iPad.
Reference Material -- whether it's PDFs of sourcebooks, access to online databases like the 4e Compendium, and iPad is a much more sensible, reasonable way to carry around the references you might need for a game. It's still possible to do without, of course -- and I should admit that I'm packing my Rules Compendium with me for my 4e games at Winter Fantasy -- but any other references documents I need I'm planning to access through my iPad.
Character Sheets -- There are many solutions available, and at this point I'd say you would have to be playing a small, edge case game to not be able to find some sort of character sheet app available for the iPad. For 4e, I'ma big fan of "i4e", by Cordax software, which takes character builder imports so I don't have to do any manual data entry -- although it's still possible to do manual data entry if I need to.
Dice -- This is one I don't like to use -- and I'm sure most of you would agree that it's a whole lot more fun to roll dice than it is to shake your iPad to pretend to roll digital dice. But, in a pinch, there are a ton of different dice apps out there. It might not be a terrible idea for some more complicated rolls, especially for those of us that don't do the math very quickly, to use an app for those rolls in the interest of keeping the game moving quickly.
Maps & Minis -- This is perhaps the most theoretical possibility for convention gaming, but it might be a real possibility in a few years. What's fun is that right now we actually have the technology.
With apps like the new version of Razeware's Battle Map, a iPad can host a game that is then shared through a cloud server to other iPads and iPhones. BM2 has both maps and figure tokens, so everything needed to represent the tactical map could be played out in the App, and accessed by players on their own devices.
This year, that's not something I'll expect to see. The app is fairly expensive, and there's no guarantee that enough players at the table will have iPads or iPhones to make it work. Also, a iPad is pretty small for a map display at a typical 8-10 seat round convention game table. At least there would be plenty of room for everyone's snacks.
But some of the biggest news coming out of CES this year was big touchscreens and larger scale tablets. In the next few years, this sort of digitally enabled play will become much more reasonable.
Fart Jokes -- Actually, what I mean by Fart Jokes is something much grander -- the fun we all have at the table, in and out of character. This is a big part of why we play, and it's the one thing that I can't imagine a technological replacement for in the near future.
The Down Sides
Multitasking With Devices - The biggest problem, with using an iPad for many of these roles -- character sheets, reference docs, dice, and even tactical tools like initiative, maps and tokens -- is that if you're trying to do all of this on one device, it can really show things down. If you have to switch back and forth between apps to look at your character sheet, and then look up the spell you'd like to cast, for example, it's going to be a little more frustrating than if you could have the book open to the spell while holding a paper character sheet.
Clearly, the dedicated gadget gamer is going to need a couple of devices to play convention games in a nearly-all-digital way.
Battery Life -- At conventions, we are used to playing for AT LEAST 12 hours in a day -- but it can be difficult to squeeze that kind of time out of an iPad if you're using it all day. You can dramatically improve the lifespan of a battery charge by being really judicious about what you have turned on, though. For one thing, you're probably best served keeping it in Airplane mode. Consider shutting down other services you might not really need -- Location services, for one thing, cane a big power drain.
Wifi -- Wireless service is not a guarantee on the convention floor. In a lot of cases, it's not necessary to have your device be useful, but it does mean that you need to think ahead. Even if a convention center does have Wifi, odds are it will be molasses-slow. If you have access to alternative ways to access the web -- through a personal access point or using a phone as a personal hotspot, etc -- you can make sure you have emergency web.But that tends to drain power quickly on both devices, so it should be kept off and used only when you need it.
Android and Windows Tablets
The app selections for Android and windows tablets isn't quite as well developed as it is for iOS devices, but it's coming along, and most of the important functions I've mentioned can be delivered on either alternative platform. Certainly PDF readers and eReaders are available on either, and dice apps are some of the earliest to come along. What's missing is the map sharing functionality that is still pretty bleeding edge, and hard to imagine using in a convention setting anytime soon.
Bottom Line:
Gadgets are getting cheaper, smaller, and more ubiquitous. It's not at all unusual to see an iPad at a convention table these days, and it's only a matter of time until it's safe to bet that more than half the players at the table will have a tablet of some sort -- and those that don't will probably at least have a smartphone. It's an exciting time, looking ahead to ways these devices will continue to improve our game experience, even when we're traveling to play.
What can you see yourself bringing to a convention?
